Gary Rydstrom - Unexpected Sounds

Here's my guest post "Gary Rydstrom’s Talk from VIEW", originally published on Designing Sound

Last year, Skywalker Sound’s Gary Rydstrom, joined for the first time the roster at View Conference – Italy’s leading computer graphics symposium – following Randy Thom in 2011. His feature presentation was called UNEXPECTED SOUNDS. The 19th October 2012, inside the Cavour Hall, at the conference center “Torino Incontra”, professionals and sound lovers coming from different countries, gathered to be part of this unique moment.

Now, we have the opportunity to present here at Designing Sound, the polished session of Gary at VIEW. The recording I made directly from the console to my Zoom H4 has been possible thanks to Maria Elena Gutierrez, director of the Festival. In this one-hour podcast, Gary talks about the art of sound design and illustrates how sound is being used and how it can be better used to tell stories. You’ll listen to many examples of raw sound effects recordings, designed sounds, and mixes from Pixar films, and live-action films such as “T2,” “Jurassic Park” and “War Horse”.

Enjoy… and thanks Gary for your invaluable experience!

Matteo



A special thanks to Shaun Farley and Peter Albrechtsen

Randy Thom @ VIEW Conference 2011

On Friday, Oct. 28, 2011 VIEW Conference hosted a Master Class with Randy Thom, Director of Sound Design at Skywalker Sound. He is a firm believer that the sooner the sound designer is involved in the pre-production, the better the story can be told. Randy illustrated how sound can shape a film, talking about how doors can be opened to sound. He also shared clips from movies where this kind of early collaboration has happened. Here's an excerpt of his talk during the workshop.

Sound as a full collaborator to make better films 

Alan Splet, Walter Murch and Ben Burtt where the three people who lived within about 20 miles each other near San Francisco who really brought a new revolution into American film sound during 70s. I was lucky enough to work with all three of them and “steal” some of their best ideas. One of the first things that you learn as a sound designer is not think to literally about sound, so one aspect of training your ear is to interpret sound in emotional terms. Subjectivity in filmmaking is a playground for sound: when the audience understand that they don’t figure out consciously, but what they seeing and hearing is being filtered through a character’s or filmmaker’s point of view in a subjective way. Very often working on a sequence for a film what you want to do is think of how you want the sound to make people feel and you analyze what it is about that sound makes you feel certain way and you go looking for sounds or raw material that have those qualities. 

Apocalypse Now

If there was ever a film where sound and image were treated more or less equally and allow to affect each other certainly is Apocalypse now. The first sound that you hear in the film - before any music or any dialogue - is a very odd, electronically synthesized helicopter sound - the Ghost Helicopter. Captain Willard is hearing the memory of the helicopter that he has. What you’re listening to is this guy’s brain. He’s remembering things, he’s hallucinating, he’s dreaming, he’s drunk and under the influence of drugs, he’s listening to his brain operate. The opening sequence is the launching point for all story, immediately the audience is put in a frame of mind that anything can happen, this is going to be a very strange ride. As he stands at the window looking outside he might heard a little fly buzzing: it took me a week to record that fly (laugh). At first he hears - and we hear - the sound of Saigon outside (car horns, Vespas, police whistles). Those sounds morph into the sound of the jungle: each one of those individual city sounds turns into specific jungle sound. Physically for the all sequence he’s still in his hotel room, but in his mind he moves back into the jungle.

Once upon a time in the West 

Sergio Leone decided early on that they will record all the music for this movie before they started shooting the film and they used the music during the shooting to help the actors and essentially to inform how the film is going to be shot. They were struggling how to make music and sound working together before shooting the sequence. Ennio Morricone, the composer, happened to go to a musique concrete concert - a genre involved using real world sounds, rather than traditional musical instruments - by a guy who played a latter, banging and scraping on it. Then he called Leone and said: “There’s should be no conventional music at all in the beginning of the film: instead you perhaps should shoot around the sound effects.” Leone went shooting the sequence thinking about how the sound of this little train station were going to work in the storytelling.

I think that’s a tragedy that very few studios these days will have the guts to allow a filmmaker to do a sequence like that. They say: “People are going to be bored, we have to fill up with uptempo music through the all thing”. Some budget filmmaking these days is “fear based”, it’s not an attempt to do something new, interesting and unusual, to open people imagination. It’s an attempt to avoid boring people, which is never a good motivation in art.

One of the things that these two scenes have in common is a very strong sense of point of view. Camera angle are very important to sound, believe it or not. The kind of shot, where an actor looking at nothing in particular, is another open door for creative, subjective sound, because the audience knows intuitively that they’re going inside the character’s head. It’s an open door for sound designers to put almost any kind of sound that we want. Having some ambiguity or mystery about the visual image makes it easier for me to do something useful with the sound. Extreme close-ups get across the idea of subjectivity. Long duration shot opens the door for sound, too. The character’s closing eyes is also an opportunity for sound to do something interesting (imaging, remembering...). The most difficult kind of shot is a brightly-lit medium shot, because you’re not focusing on anything in particular and there’s no mystery there, there’s nothing that invites the ear to help figure out what’s going on.

Another element they’ve in common is sparse dialogue. I’m certainly not against dialogue in film - dialogue will always has a role. Dialogue and sound design generally don’t go well together, because there’s something about the human voice that the human ear want to attempt to.
If someone is talking - no matter how hard a director ask me to try to push sound effects during that sequence - it will distract you from the dialogue, which the audience is trying to hear. The way to solve that problem is to design the sequence in a way that there are moments for the dialogue and moments for sound effects. A compromised has to be made, you can’t as a filmmaker try to fire all your bullets at the same time, it’s not going to work. One category of sound tends to dominate at a time - it’s dialogue, it’s music or it’s sound effects. Another bad tendency in contemporary filmmaking is to try to set it up so that all three dominates simultaneously, it will never works. Lazy filmmakers will just call the composer: “make some very strange music telling the audience that this is a very strange place”. As a sound designer you try to do things and variations in the same way a music composer, to use sound in pure musical way: tempo, harmony and rhythm to evoke emotion. Think about what elements in a set could generate the sound useful for the storytelling: this will be more powerful at the end, it’s not a decoration, that’s a very organic way of telling the audience “this is a very strange place”.

Sound-friendly scripts

Most writers are obsessed with words, and they tend to think words should dominate every sequence, with wall-to-wall dialogue.

Filmmakers simply don’t think about how to use sound in that way before start shooting the sequence. Think about what the characters hear. Think about how the things they hear affects them and how character changes over time. I often found people who come from visual/light background - which David Lynch did - have very interesting sound ideas. He demands you to be creative all the time.

Another thing I told to directors is: during rehearsal in a live action scene, play with your actors in terms to find things in the space that can make sound that will be useful to the story.

As a sound designer, try to imagine ways that sound could playing in an interesting but organic, truthful way to help the storytelling in the sequence. Try to think to other powerful sounds that the audience doesn’t expect. Part of your job as a sound person - I think - is to help the director make the best film possible. If you have interesting ideas - and you should have them - about the way of film shooting that allow you to do something you couldn’t do otherwise, of course you should talk about it.

Sound for Animation 

Thanks to big aesthetic jumps in animation, more contemporary animation directors want movies should sound like a live-action movie. For “How to Train Your Dragon” I come up very early on with some speculative vocalizations for the dragons that will help the animators to animate to those elements. I tried to use real-world animal sounds - tiger growls, elephant, whales, goats, camel, dogs - to cover a wide range of emotions, allowing sound to influence the animation. The challenge is how to make the transition from one to another, which needs a lot of work and experimentation with pitch-changing techniques.

Sound Mixing 

Mix is about to choose right or most powerful sound in any given moment. In a moment when you need to hear the dialogue you try to artfully lower or eliminate sets of other sounds that are competing with the dialogue at that moment. Space can make sounds useful to the story: there are a lot of others tricks like moving the sound effects and the music into the side loudspeakers and have the voices mostly come out from the center speaker, which make a little bit easier to understand the lines of dialogue. Sound is more powerful if comes from a place we doesn't expect. You need to think of sound in terms of spectrum and frequencies and tailor those for a given moment.


Related Post:

• Creating Film Sound: an interview with Richard Beggs, pt.1

Ben Burtt about the genesis of the TIE fighter sounds

[an excerpt from The Sounds of Star Wars - © Chronicle Books]

The genesis of the TIE fighter sounds is another story, one that began with Ben Burtt's search for the laser gun effect.



Originally, George Lucas had seen a British documentary on PBS about the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II and had noted that the firing sound of some strange Nazi rockets was quite weird and interesting. Lucas mentioned that it might make a great sound for the laser gun and Burtt managed to find a copy of the documentary. He then set about finding sources that could emulate that sound. Luckily, at Twentieth Century Fox Studios, Don Hall let Burtt go through the Fox sound library, where he found recordings of some elephants that had been done for an Errol Flynn movie The Roots of Heaven [1958]. In that film, elephants stampeded and bellowed. with an almost shrieking sound (the same sounds were used for the dinosaurs in Journey to the Center of the Earth).

After making a copy of that recording, Burtt realized that when he slowed it down and stretched it out, he ended up with a sound similar to the rocket one in the PBS documentary.

[The Lost World - 1960]

But it wasn't quite right, so Burtt took the sound of the elephant and mixed it with pass-bys he'd recorded of cars during a rainstorm as they sped through puddles in front of a motel where he was staying (a pass-by is when a vehicle comes toward the viewer, passes by, and then speeds away).
"Swoosh, the car would come by, and you heard this car plowing through the water," he says. "I took that sound still thinking that I was making a laser of some kind." The key "a-ha" moment occurred during temp track auditions, as shots started coming in from ILM of the gunport sequence.
"When we did temp mixes and played it back for the crew at Park Way, I would take advantage of the fresh audience, because the editors hadn't heard anything with sound," Burtt explains.
"The gunport sequence came along with the first trial shots of actual TIEs in motion. There was pressure to just get some temporary sound in for a screening, so I grabbed a random set of sounds I liked and cut in a different one each time a TIE fighter zoomed by," continues Burtt. "One sound was the elephant shriek, the next one was a slowed-down World War II warbird, the next a processed jet or rocket."
After the screening was over, the only talk in the room was about that elephant swoosh sound. "That was the greatest sound for those ships you could have possibly picked!" Of course, I was saying, "Oh yeah, of course". I’d really put it in because I had no other altemative, but it got great reviews, so naturally it became the sound ofthe TIE fighters."
"ln World War II, the super dive bombers had an artificially created siren wail created by air ducts," explains Joe Johnston, visual effects art director. "They didn't serve any purpose except to create this noise, which would terrify people. It was intended that the TIE should achieve the same effect."

An interview with Gary Rydstrom

by Matteo Milani and Federico Placidi - U.S.O. Project, 2011 

Gary Rydstrom was born in 1959 in Chicago, IL. He graduated from the University of Southern California - School of Cinematic Arts in 1981. He began his career at Sprocket Systems, formerly Skywalker Sound, in 1983. Offered the job by a college professor, Gary received the opportunity to work with his mentor, Star Wars sound designer Ben Burtt. He created sound for numerous successful films including Backdraft, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Jurassic Park, Titanic, Saving Private Ryan, Minority Report and Finding Nemo. Through this work he has won 7 Academy Awards.
Rydstrom did his first work for Pixar on the short film Luxo Jr.. John Lasseter has said it was Rydstrom's work on Luxo Jr., such as creating the lamp's voice from the squeak of a lightbulb being screwed in, that taught him how sound can be a partner in the storytelling of a film. In 2006 he has made his directorial debut with the Pixar animated short Lifted. He recently jumped again into the director's chair to create his second animated short Hawaiian Vacation, set to play in front of Cars 2. 

[Rydstrom talks about the first of Pixar's new brand of Toy Story shorts @ AWN] 

For every director and for all of us the goal is at any one moment in a movie to have the audience on the edge of their feet and can't wait to see what happens next. You are moved by these characters, you believe in these characters. All the meticulous and hard work should be completely invisible. We wanted to be involved in the scene and we don’t you to think that Nemo is a bunch of computer layout. We do not want you to think the many hours that took to create that scene. You are just carried away by the scene and every focus in every step of the production that we do at Pixar is about the story. It is about entertaining the audience. - John Lasseter, 66th Venice Film Festival 


USO: Gary, you’re the third person – of our personal “respect-list” – who came from a sound career and crossed over to a director’s chair: Walter Murch did it first, Ben Burtt came after him. They still design their own sound for their works, just as you did for your first short movie Lifted (with a tribute like the Wilhelm Scream at the very end). How did you manage the transition from sound designer/re-recording mixer to director? How about your feelings?

Gary Rydstrom: Working in film sound is a great way to immerse yourself in the rhythms of a movie. Having done sound for so many movies, and so many different kinds of movies, I’m hoping I’ve developed some mysterious “film instinct.” I think the best directors – and best sound designers – work more from their gut than their brain. In other words, to make movies, your gut has to be bigger than your brain… or maybe I should rephrase that?


GR: "It was a little scary but I always wanted to make films and wanted to have opportunities to write and tell stories. So Pixar being old friends, they gave me this opportunity to come over there and do that. So it was a little scary because there were a lot of things I had to learn. But doing sound for so many years, what I found was that the big similarity is that sound is all about rhythm. It’s about using sound, rhythm helps delineate sound effects, sound tracks, and telling a story with these kind of rhythms is really key. Animation is really about rhythms and timing so I think working in sound gave me a great sense of timing. In fact, on Lifted I used, before animation had been started, used a temp soundtrack to express the timing that I wanted to the animators so they had some reference of what I was after. It was a way for me to even communicate to the animators." - CanMag

[Lifted producer Katherine Sarafian and director Gary Rydstrom © AWN Inc]

USO: Did you develop and learn your new craft in sound room working movie by movie?

GR: Central to sound design is finding what feels right for a movie, what matches its look and heart. So every movie I worked on taught me different lessons. I kept thinking I was close to end of my lessons, but they never ended. Turns out that’s what makes working in film fun. It’s never the same twice. 


USO: Being close to first-class directors during all your sound career has thought you well?

GR: I felt like a spy, watching a lot of directors. I’ve been very lucky to have worked with many of the best – Spielberg, Cameron, Lasseter, Redford – and you probably don’t need me to tell you (their movies do) how different in approach they were. One thing the best have in common: they inspire their crews.


GR: "... I've had this long, great relationship with John Lasseter and Pixar. I've felt involved throughout the whole filmmaking process on their films. They offered me an opportunity to develop and direct films, maybe because I bring an outsider's perspective while still being a Pixar guy through and through.
My friends there know that I've had a long-standing love of comedy. When I first told Steven Spielberg and George Lucas that I was doing this, they were touchingly supportive and generous with advice. I'm grateful for my sound career. It gave me the equivalent of 50-yard-line seats, second row, during a fascinating era in film history." - Mix Magazine 


USO: Can you describe what you were feeling when you left the Technical Building (where you spent almost 20 years), and all your friends at Lucas Skywalker Sound, to your new life/experience in Emeryville?

GR: Luckily I get back to Skywalker Sound quite often, otherwise I’d REALLY miss my old friends and career. Pixar’s no slouch, but there isn’t a more beautiful place to work than Skywalker Ranch. 


I've known Gary for over 20 years and he's really been a mentor and a role model for me, as to how to do this work. His standard for quality, inventiveness and humor is really always in the back of my mind when I work. No one is a quicker study when you break down a scene or a film in terms of what, soundwise, is the best direction to go to serve the story. - Tom Myers, Skywalker Sound 


USO: What does it mean for you to associate a particular sound to a visual event (identifying it in a vast catalogue as big as the sound library of SkySound)? What are the mental or purely instinctive paths competing in making the choice?

GR: Something magical happens when a sound effect is added to picture – and it’s not predictable. After all my years of doing it, I still depend on experimenting, putting sounds against image and seeing what happens. First time I did this, as a film student, it amazed me how sound could “open up” a movie, how the combination of sound and visual could create something greater than the sum parts. Having a great sound library is essential, but the real secret is how one uses it. 


GR: "I wanted to give the lamps in Luxo Jr. character through sound. I told John (Lasseter) that I'd come up with these voices. He'd never imagined they'd have voices and was wary of the idea. But I experimented with taking real sounds — a lot of it as simple as unscrewing a light bulb or scraping metal. Every once in a while, a sound would be produced that would remind you of sadness or glee. I always think of sound design being like prospecting for gold. Start by, say, goofing around, making lots of sounds, then find the one percent that has something interesting about it. Put this against the film, and there's a magical moment when the sound, if it's right, merges into the image, brings it to life. They were not cartoon-y. They were fun, reality-based sounds. It felt like the birth of something new, even then." - Mix Magazine

USO: Many sound artists working in other domains like electroacoustic music, musique concrete, environmental sounds has been strongly influenced by the contemporary cinema, and by its ability to create stories with the help of sound effects, soundscapes and even to define the personality of some "objects" with unmistakable sounds. How it is possible to interrelate these multiplicity of experience? 

GR: What all sound artists share is a desire to convey emotions, so I certainly was inspired by non-movie sound work. Sound is emotion. Not just music, but all sound. Humans (who can hear) seem to take sound in general for granted, which is frustrating, but liberating. How manipulative can we be when no one’s paying attention! 


USO: While Europe was experiencing electronics and sound design like natural language consequence of the avant-garde of 50's, in the U.S. this journey took place independently in the field of the film industry with other purposes and objectives. You were aware of what was happening in the old continent and its experiments?

GR: I’m certainly aware of the European traditional of producing “soundscapes” (for lack of a better word) for radio. In some ways, I was jealous of sound work that didn’t depend on the visual – how free it seemed! Best I could do was build an “off-screen” world in film. But I always had a movie to be influenced by – how scary to have sound work stand on its own. 


USO: You've been one of the most assiduous "regulars" of the Synclavier, an instrument widely used in various musical fields. Can you describe the creative approach with this tool? What were your procedures? What made it such as a instrument so unique? To create the sound of the engines of the Titanic you and Chris Boyes worked long on the Synclavier to reproduce the effect in question. Do you remember how you did it?

GR: I fell in love with the Synclavier early in my career because it was such a powerful instrument for shaping natural sounds. I never used the FM synthesis – even making electronic sound effects I would try to use natural sounds, just because I find real sounds are more interesting. Sampling sounds and putting them on a keyboard allowed me to quickly experiment with pitch and layering, which are my primary tools for bending real sounds to my will. The Titanic engine sounds took advantage of how the Synclavier could speed up and slow down a sound pattern. For me, nothing beats using a “musical” instrument for creating sound effects.


GR: "The idea of using a sampler for sound effects work had astonishing potential. With sampled sounds in RAM, you can instantly pitch-bend it and layer it and play it and shape it, without using any processing time. You can layer on the same key and very finely manipulate the pitch and delay and merge them together in ways that were harder to do in the tape-to-tape days. It allowed me to create the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, in which I took several layers and blended different animal sounds into what sounds like one animal.
With the Synclavier, I have a library of sound “parts,” little snippets that are like phonemes in language. Interesting bits of sound that can be rearranged in multitudes of ways. It's a library of raw material, and it's valuable still." - Mix Magazine


USO: How about your relationship with Ben Burtt along your sound career and especially now in Pixar? I mean crosstalk and dialogue, to share ideas. Could you describe him as a mentor, a friend, a colleague, a druid?

GR: All of my approaches and philosophies about sound come from Ben Burtt. At the time he was revolutionizing sound design, I was lucky enough to get a job at Sprocket Systems and see how he did it, how much he knew about film sound history, and most importantly how much he cared about using sound to tell a story. When I started working on Jurassic Park, I remember Ben was away on vacation. I stumbled along until he came back – for all sorts of reasons, psychological and practical, I couldn’t get started until he was in the building.



[Gary Rydstrom Talks About Cinema Sound - via DolbyInsider]


USO: Nowadays many sound designers are working in nonlinear environments like Pro Tools, Nuendo with tons of plug-ins to make everything. One thing we always admired in your work is the exquisite and unfailing "organic" sound and his innate musicality. It seems that sounds "exist" in nature and are not a product of a skilled craftsman. Would you like to talk about that?

GR: There’s a danger in processing sound too much. I believe the best sound effects come from the best raw recordings, and are tweaked as little as possible. The world is so full of amazing sounds – sounds no synthesizer can match – so why not find them and use them?


GR: [...] I remember a scene in the first Mission Impossible in which Tom Cruise breaks into a computer room at the CIA, for which we’d added all these sound details for equipment he was using to lower himself in. Yet the idea was that if he made any sound over a certain level, he would trip the alarm. Brian De Palma ultimately said, “No, take it all out.” And for the most part, that scene plays with nothing on the track. I went to see it with an audience and it had the desired effect: It made everyone lean in, pay closer attention, get nervous. Tension comes from the silence of that scene.
[...] Silence can be thought of as a type of sound. It’s like when somebody years ago figured out that zero was a number. And silence is just as valid as an amazing sound. Every sound editor can’t help but think of how to fill up a track; it’s what we’re paid for. - excerpts from “From here on in, absolute silence.” [via Benjamin Wright]

Thanks Gary... keep up the good work! M&F

Sound designer Randy Thom talks about 'Apocalypse Now'

[via notam02.no]

Related Posts:

• Creating Film Sound: an interview with Richard Beggs, pt.1

The wait is over: #StarWars Saga coming to Blu-ray :-)

Lucasfilm announced that the complete Star Wars Saga will be released on Blu-ray in September 2011.

We already pre-ordered Star Wars: The Complete Saga at Amazon.com (with a substantial discount)!

• Star Wars: The Complete Saga on Blu-ray (9-disc Set includes all six films)
• Star Wars: Prequel Blu-ray Trilogy (3-disc set includes Episodes I-III)
• Star Wars: Original Blu-ray Trilogy (3-disc set includes Episodes IV-VI)

[read the full Lucasfilm press release on StarWars.com]
[watch the video promoting the release]

Ben Burtt to present "Emma's Time Machine: Adventures in Time and Space"

While reading this article by Paul Liberatore (via Marin History Museum), we discovered that our hero Ben Burtt just finished editing "Red Tails", the upcoming movie about the Tuskegee Airmen - the African-American pilots who fought in World War II (produced by Lucasfilm). And he's about to start sound work on the first live-action film by Andrew Stanton, "John Carter of Mars".

Ben will join his daughter Emma Burtt for the premiere of Adventures in Time and Space, the latest chapter of Emma's Time Machine, a 90-minute documentary on the history of Marin County. Narrated by Emma, the film also takes a look back at the early days of Lucasfilm in San Anselmo and includes clips of the Marin County locations used for motion pictures, from the days of silent movies until Indiana Jones.

"This film is really the result of a lot of little stories," Ben Burtt said. "I decided that we'd try to connect them all together in a kind of walking tour idea that juxtaposes the past and the present. It's nostalgia. I've always had a great interest in finding some way to connect with the past."

[Dad-daughter film team makes time to go back in time]
[Emma's Time Machine: Adventures in Time and Space - via California Film Institute]

Ben Burtt receives Silver Award from the Town of San Anselmo

[Photo Credit: berndt2]

Ben Burtt, who helped preserve San Anselmo history in films, has been named a Silver Award winner. Burtt documented the local floods of 1982 and 2005 in “The Great Flood of 1982” and “12/31.” He says, he “collected footage from 15 or 16 different people and added that to my own. The film shows people being rescued, basements being flooded and so on.” 

Burtt, who says he’s always had “a big interest in history,” first became interested in San Anselmo’s while working on the first “Star Wars” film with George Lucas. He became fascinated with pictures he found in the local library that showed some of the changes the town had gone through.

Burtt also made a lengthy audio recording of the town’s historical walking tour, complete with sounds of old San Anselmo. That recording, a celebration of the town’s 2007 centennial, is available for download from the museum’s website.

[via marinscope.com]
[see footage online of Burtt’s film @ filmnight.org]

Before Skywalker Sound there was Lucasfilm's Sprocket Systems, which opened in 1979 at 321 San Anselmo Avenue in San Anselmo. Film editors worked upstairs on "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and "The Empire Strikes Back" while sound editors downstairs worked on "Alien" and "E.T." Kentfield resident Pat Walsh, discovered while shopping at Seawood Photo, provided the voice for the loveable alien, with the help of actress Debra Winger. Sprocket's parking lot was also notable: It's where Harrison Ford practiced snapping a bullwhip for his role in "Raiders." Sprocket's work on "The Return of the Jedi" came to a halt when the Flood of 1982 ruined equipment. The division moved to Lucafilm's Kerner complex in March of that year.

[sananselmohistory.org]

'The Prisoner of Zenda'
- Playing at the Rafael Film Center on June 13th, 2010 -

Craig Barron, Oscar®-winning visual effects supervisor and Academy governor, and Ben Burtt, Oscar-winning sound designer, will introduce a rare screening of the 1937 adventure-romance 'The Prisoner of Zenda'. Burtt will demonstrate how the sound effects from the film's famous swordfights were achieved.

[via California Film Institute]

The tale of Lucasfilm & Skywalker Ranch (by Philip Bloom)

Skywalker Ranch from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.

Filmed at Skywalker Ranch on the Canon 5DmkII conformed to 24p and the Canon 7D shooting native 24p.

Timelapse done using stills.

Music is Venus by Gustav Holst.

Read more about this excellent, stunning work via philipbloom.co.uk. Pure magic!